Around the World contest has ended. With 36 demos from 21 runners, it's a great turnout. Congratulations to Martin Selinus for nabbing 1st place in BOTH categories.

Check out your own results and get all demos here!

Also, the championship ladder has now been updated with the first points. Check it out. And let the champion chase begin...

All demos are in the usual pack here.

You've probably noticed a distinct lack of updates around these parts. That's because I suck. Also, happy birthday my brother Sean! On with the demos.

The last update had an ID SP demo on it, and this one is no exception. The famous Thomas Stubgaard tossed his head haughtily and scoffed at Mathias Thore's supposed improvement to the Ebon Fortress's Nightmare 100% improvement when it arrived in the mailbox, and vowed to set it straight. At least, I imagine he did, because we have a shiny new 2:14, a full 12 seconds faster than the aforementioned swede. Being an episode 2 level, it's full of tricks and slayage.

Elsewhere on the ID front, we have a few coops. After making that gruelling e2m4 demo, Stubby and I went onto something much more relaxing; the Tomb of Terror! Killing everything takes quite some time, and we did so in 7:10 on Easy, 48 seconds faster than our last attempt, and a solid minute faster than the single player time. MUST DOWNLOAD!!!

Azure Agony got a bit of a look in, with 2 coops from roughly the same bunch. First Jaakko Alakopsa, Alexander Osipov and Basil de Vries banded together killed everything on Easy in 1:00, beating some americans by 5 seconds. Then Paul Davies got recruited and brought the 4-player time down to 0:51, 6 seconds faster than a different bunch of euros.

The other ID coop was an Easy 100% on the Palace of Hate, and substituted Thomas Bergendorff for me, which is probably a wise move. The time fell by 8 seconds to 0:47, which means nobody has any reason to watch e4m4c055.dem anymore. :)

Michael Hudson has been a busy bee recently on the Rogue maps, considered by most to be 'slightly irritating'. Despite this damning judgement, not one but three demos on r1m4 sit before us. The ever-popular Easy 100% got a self-improvement of 15 seconds to 2:30. Then, the skill got turned up a few notches and a Nightmare 100% of 4:16, beating Justin by just 8 seconds. As if to make up for this, he then gave us a shinier 4:09, again 15 seconds faster than the previous record.

He didn't give up there, either. Onto his favourite level r2m6 and a respectable partnership with the ephemeral Richard Skidmore. Out of the melting pot comes a 2-Player Nightmare Run of 2:28 proportions, a mere 28 seconds faster than mwh on his tod. Only one demo away from single player TO and coop TO!

czg's brilliant episode terra got several demos, all of which feature NahkahiiR. First (obviously) is terra1; the de Mestres lost both 100%s here to JP. Easy in 1:00 and Nightmare in 1:03. We also had time to trounce the Nightmare 100% on terra2 by the very same frenchies, the new time is 1:09. An total improvement of 52 seconds!

Jaakko is not known for stopping at a mere 6 demos in an update, however. I sidestepped into some lava and Orbs arrived to take my place. Together they bashed at terra3 until all the 2-Player holes were filled. To this end they did a Nightmare 100% in 1:09, and got 0:09 on both Easy and Nightmare. Then some of their enthusiasm spilled over into terra4, where the de Mestres lost another demo. The Easy 100% got 16 seconds smashed off the clock, a mere 1:24 remains.

Anders Nordensten made a big comeback recently, and beat the crap out of the demos on abw. First he beat Jaakko's Nightmare Run by 4 seconds to get 2:29, then improved it a whole bunch to get 2:12, and later 2:04. However, the task of removing NahkahiiR's unholy taint from this level was not yet over! The Easy 100% was cleansed and christened 1:24, while the Nightmare 100% was thoroughly purged, resulting in 3:04. TO restored!

The rest of the demos get bullet points.

• arcane: Lodis got off his backside and recorded an EH of 1:54, beating Carl Tholin by 3 seconds. Then he sliced off another second and settled at 1:53.
• bub2: Basil took the reins here, beating the previous EH by Connor to get 0:28. Then he went on to the Real Skill and recorded 0:27, much faster than Rickard Axelsson's 0:35.
• colony2: Joshua Anthony resurfaced from nothingitude and yet another Easy 100% was sent in, beating Jaakko by 14 seconds to get 1:10.
• dazsp1: Nathan Egan still isn't finished with the Nightmare Run, recording first 1:11, then 1:09. Unfortunately for him, Tom Nguyen had a go too, and made 1:04. Keep trying!
• n3sp03: Anders also remembered how to play this level, and beat his old Nightmare Run by 5 seconds to get 1:40. Then he remembered how to play well and gave us 1:33.

That was far too many demos. You're lucky we bother!

Time for a CONTEST! We'll run easy runs and nightmare 100% on Around The World by Rutger Baks. Go check it out NOW! Run your little pants off and send your demos no later than Midnight CET, Wednesday October 25th 2006.

But there's more. This contest marks the start of The Third SDA Championship! That alone should be a good incentive for anyone to make a few demos. Even YOU!

All demos here.

There's a SP ID demo in this update, so it goes first. Stand up Aleksander Osipov and take a bow as we applaud your Easy 100% of Azure Agony, at 1:53 two seconds faster than the boomstick of Timo Nieminen.

(If you've seen Timo's demo you'll already know this, but: it's really really good. Must Download and all that.)

About ten days ago, I beat Justin Fleck's ye olde Easy 100% of r1m4 by five seconds to get 2:45. This update would have happened much sooner if I hadn't kept having "just one more go" at beating the utterly traumatising Nightmare 100%... I've matched it, but not beat it yet[1].

In other news, new demos by new players on new maps. First new boy Jason Heyes sent in 2:06 for the dazsp1 Nightmare Run and then newer boy Nathan Egan beat him by nearly a minute to get a promising 1:12.

Then professional old fart Thomas Bergendorff made the remaining hole on the map well and truly his with a 2:23 for the Nightmare 100%. He also took a clean sweep of the records on sewage, getting 1:56 for the Easy Run, 3:54 for the Easy 100%, 2:47 for the Nightmare Run and finally 6:24 for the Nightmare 100%. They're probably quite good, but I don't think I've watched them all yet...

ID coops then. Jaakko Alakopsa is in all of them but one so to save space and yellow pixels I shall refer to him as J.

Before we get into the details, a story. It's Saturday night in #qdq and then this happens:

  *** Jozsef has joined #qdq
  <Jozsef> Coop?

J tried to host but had some problems, so Robert Maglic phoned up Mathias Thore who had just gone to bed. Undeterred, he fired up his trusty quake and the four of them recorded the Grisly Grotto Easy 100% in 0:36. This was just the warm up though, for then (finishing around 6 AM for J and merely 5am for the others) they recorded a super tight Easy 100% of The Door To Chthon in just 0:18.

The cultured speedrun watcher will know that Mathias Thore recently "borrowed" the the Ebon Fortress Nightmare 100% from Thomas Stubgaard. Given that they both obviously know this map pretty well by now, it made sense for them to attempt the 2 player version. It's less obvious that it makes sense for them to try for nearly a week, but that's what it took for them to get 1:26, beating Weixing Ye and Xiaokui Xiao by 4 seconds.

There were also a huddle of demos from the TMPJ team of the last update (that's Thomas Stubgaard, Michael Hudson, Paul Davies and J for those lacking both memory and scrollbars). All tablefillers, they were:

• The the Wizard's Manse Nightmare 100% in 1:07 (2P time 1:41).
• The the Tomb of Terror Easy 100% in 0:31 (3P time 0:39).
• The Hell's Atrium Easy 100% in 0:49 (3P time 0:56).
• The Hell's Atrium Nightmare 100% in 1:07 (3P time 1:28).

Basil de Vries clearly knows about Easy 100%s of the Palace of Hate. Not only does he still have the single player record, but he also now has his share of the two player (1:16 and then 1:13 with J) and three player (0:58 with J and Jozsef Szalontai) records. Four player next? Five??

We finish up with some non-ID coops (strange idea, I know). First I took Paul Davies on a probably unwelcome tour of r2m6, filling the long neglected 2 player Nightmare 100% with a not too shabby (hey, only one of us died!) 3:21.

The craziest of Finns, NahkahiiR (who else?), was involved in all the remaining coops. First he and Orbs got 0:53 for the klz100b2 Nightmare 100%, an impressive 1:05 faster than the single player time. Then he and Mandel upset Kimmo and Paul by beating their Easy Run of terra2 by 2 seconds to get 0:33. Finally he and sidd took on all the that the Easy skill of dm3rmx had to offer and got a tidy 2:25.

Now back to that sodding NH...

[1] I don't know who is responsible for DoE's "super spawns", but I'm going to get you.

The all demos download for this update is available here.

Before I explain the above, let me mention that something remarkable has happened: Mathias Thore beat Thomas Stubgaard's Nightmare 100% of the Ebon Fortress by one second to get 2:26. I'm sure Mandel has claimed more than once that he can't aim, this puts the lie to that!

The theme of this update was set when TeamSDA were hanging out in our funky boudoir and noticed that as the mini-speedcon had filled the last of the 3-Player Easy 100% holes on the ID maps, it was time to start work on the corresponding Nightmare 100%s and that's just what we did.

Strangely enough, the only consistently present player was me, Michael "M" Hudson. Helping me along were Thomas "T" Stubgaard, Paul "P" Davies and Jaakko "J" Alakopsa. In chronological order:

• TMPJ did Hell's Atrium in 1:28 (two player time: 1:46)
• TMPJ did Satan's Dark Delight in 0:57 (two player time: 0:59)
• TMPJ did the Sewage System in 0:48 (two player time: 0:51, which was faster than the old NH3...)
• TMPJ did Gloom Keep in 0:46 (two player time: 0:51)
• TMPJ did Ziggurat Vertigo in 0:53 (two player time: 1:00)

We think the remaining NH3 holes might take a bit longer to fill.... e4m6, for example.

The whole TMPJ gang then got together for the 4 player Nightmare 100% of Gloom Keep and thrashed out a 0:40 and a splinter MPJDavid Spickermann team did the same thing to the Sewage System getting a respectable also 0:40.

I've had a pretty busy week; in addition to the above ID coopery I've finally taken TO of r2m6, beating Nolan's old Nightmare 100% by four seconds to get 3:57 and also 2 player Easy Running around r2m3 with Lag.Com to get 1:02, beating Pif et Luc by 9 seconds.

That's not all! Jaakko and Paul were daft enough to do the coop two player runs of sm126_neg!ke getting 0:04 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE.

That's still not all! In the only "not involving an SDA staffer" demos of the week, Flávio Quadros improved two recent records, beating his own Easy Run of mexx10b by 6 seconds to get 1:30 and Jaakko's Easy 100% of n3_100b by 8 seconds to get 0:58.

Something should go here.

The all demos download for this gigantesque update is available from here.

What happens when you give a bunch of insane speedrunners new levels to play on? Well, you get a trillion demos sent in. This means someone has to update with all of them... ho hum.

The very vertical map ftfs100b got the most submissions in the last 12 days, so I'll deal with it first. It's fairly small and a teeny bit cramped, but this did not deter 5 different runners from having a bash. Strangely, the first demo sent in was a Nightmare Run...

• ... by Tom Nguyen, completing it in 0:41.
• Some time later, Jonathan Lenhardt woke up and blasted out this 0:38.
• Confusingly, Thomas Bergendorff then took the time out to send us a 0:41. Oops. :)
• Jonathan wasn't finished yet, improving by another second for 0:37...
• ... and then yet another. 0:36 it is then.

At some point Flávio Quadros realised that the skill variable starts at "0" and sent in this 0:26. Predictably, Jonathan knocked off a second, leaving the current record at 0:25.

Our resident Easy 100% fanatic Jaakko Alakopsa turned his beady eyes to this map, savagely destroying everything that came near him in a mere 0:47. Then our resident ftfs100b fanatic the|navigator recorded a merer 0:43, an extremely mere 0:42 and finally the merest 0:41. Undeterred, Jaakko then redid it all on Nightmare in 1:32. No 0wnage then. :)

JD are back together (NahkahiiR and David Spickermann for the uninitiated), resulting in a couple of coops for our viewing pleasure. First they killed everything on Easy, getting 0:31, then ignored the monsters and got 0:21. Bravo.

So, other maps. Next up is dazsp1, which is evidently quite difficult on Nightmare, as we didn't get any demos on that skill. Oh well.

• A relatively slow 1:18 Run from Dmitry Dementjev was the first entry.
• Unhappy with the word 'slow' being applied to one of his demos, he improved it to 1:03, much better.
• Still upset about the slander, 1:00 came in.
• And finally a pride-restoring 0:59.
• Which Thomas Bergendorff promptly demolished, getting 0:55.
• He likes to kill stuff too; he sent in this 2:18 100% whilst highly drunk.
• Jaakko saw a record opportunity, and sneakily beat it by a single second!
• Lodis wasn't happy about that, so he hit back with a 2:07.
• Lag.Com/I got roped into some coop with Jaakko; we turned out this ropy 1:39 2-player Easy 100%.

n3_100b only got a handful of demos, which is about right, because it's annoying!

• Only GinKo bothered to run this one, and he got 1:06 on Easy.
• Mr Busy Finnish Demo Guy killed everything first, submitting this 1:35.
• The aforementioned Run-merchant took a swing at this category too, giving us a slightly better 1:09.
• But it's okay, because Jaakko just took 3 more seconds off and got 1:06.
• He was also the only guy stupid brave enough to face the multitudes of shamblers on Nightmare; he eradicated everything in 2:53 and somehow survived.
• As is usual, he also grabbed somebody for a coop; this time it happened to be Michael Hudson. Together they shafted all the monsters on Easy in 0:57.

The other new map is sm126_neg!ke. The runs are short and frustrating. The 100%s are long and frustrating. Smiles all round!

• Bergie first saw the potential of the spawns scattered about and recorded this 0:10 on Easy.
• GinKo got the same idea and did it a bit quicker; 0:08 on Easy and Nightmare too.
• Then I did it in 0:07, on both skills.
• Distressed that he didn't have his grubby hands on this map too, Jaakko engaged the Easy Rider and killed everything in 3:09.
• Then later, 3:02.
• Turning it up a couple of difficulty notches, he also did 3:03 on Nightmare.
• Shockingly, Richard Skidmore managed to tear himself away from milking cows enough to take fully 21 seconds off this demo, giving us a neat 2:42.

A few people looked back into the annals of SDA history and hand-picked slightly older maps than these four. Flávio turned in a rather nice rd1m1b Easy Run, somehow beating Kay by a single second to achieve 0:39.

He also singled out mexx10b for some polish. Radix lost ownership of both runs here; 4 seconds came off the Easy Run, now 1:36. Shortly after, 2:03 arrives, an improvement of 9 seconds.

Poor Nolan also lost another record to mwh a matter of minutes ago. Engaging the insanity drive, he improved the Easy 100% on r2m6 by 5 seconds to finish in 3:07. I just watched it. It's pretty good.

Oh yeah, we also had some ID coops! You'll have noticed a rather cool demo on end which pushed the boundaries of what we thought possible. Naturally the next step is to do it with more players. The perpetrator of this masterpiece, Thomas Stubgaard, grabbed a handy Mathias Thore and went on to smack the Easy 100% down to just 0:30. Then Jaakko walked into the room, unable to say 'no' to a coop session. Some minutes later, they knocked off that important second from the EH2 and got 0:29. Not bad!

Excuse me while my fingers fall off now.

The all demos download for this update is available from here.

We treat you well here at SDA. We host thousands of demos, we write updates, we run contests and even occasionally make demos (for example, Thomas Stubgaard, Paul Davies and Michael Hudson beating Martin Selinus, Jonny Andersson and Niklas Wikstrand's 3-Player Easy 100% of the Ebon Fortress by four seconds to get 0:50), and how do you treat us?

You treat us like dirt. I mean, beating contest-winning demos. That's just rude. But that never stopped Arturo García Lasca before, and it didn't stop him sending in a horror Easy Run in 0:24, one second faster than Graffz. And, as for Dmitry Dementjev, his beating of Cyborg's Easy Run of cbfspq2 is embarrassingly only one second faster than the contest winning demo at 0:25.

It's also crappy when people find safely forgotten maps and disturb some peaceful old records. Dmitry Dementjev committed this sin too, pushing the gor1 Easy Run down to the moral and temporal low of 0:51, beating Daniel Lindberg by 3 seconds. The master of this transgression, though, is Thomas Bergendorff. He was at it again on eyesock, his 1:14 Easy 100% being 2 seconds faster than Amrik.

At least lodis beat Amrik, though. Flávio Quadros had no such excuse for beating Fabian's Easy 100% of elden1 a few months back, and made the offense even worse by beating Fab's Nightmare 100% by five seconds and getting 0:54. Attempting and failing to make it better, he also improved the Easy 100% by another 6 seconds to 0:49. He also sent in his third improvement to the frostbite Easy Run getting 1:13 this time. Why didn't you just send this in the first time, you slacker?

A guaranteed way to wind us up is to beat a demo of an SDA staffer. Jaakko Alakopsa doesn't seem to care, as he beat my percept Nightmare 100% by 5 seconds to get 3:44 and unka Morfans' aard100 Easy 100% by a provocative 15 seconds to get 4:19. Watch it, alcopops boy.

Nothing better to finish an update with than a pair of crappy coops from Evan Wagner and Justin Fleck. Both in that worst of categories, the 2-Player Easy Run, their demos on bnt2 (1:10) and ikspq2 (0:46) unreasonably beat perfectly friendly demos from some French people and some Finns.

Despite having to deal with all the above crap, we still love you. We love you so much, in fact, that we've added four more maps for you fuckers to make crappy speedruns on:

• sm126_neg!ke by Neg!ke. About time we had a map from this nutter. Spawn-tastic. Call your demos 126n_XXX.
• dazsp1 by Darren 'DAZ' Weekes. Old skool ID textures. Call your demos daz1_XXX.
• n3_100b by Necros. We don't think you're good enough for this map. Call your demos n100_XXX.
• ftfs100b by Matthew Warwick. From the same 100 brush contest as Necros' map, we think. Call your demos ftfs_XXX.

See you next week! Stay ugly.

The all demos download for this update is available from the predictable location. DOWNLOAD IT. Now.

It seems to have become fashionable to vigourously beat yourself on ID levels this week. Mathias Thore was so keen he did it twice, finding a new tunnel related trick that shaved one second of each run of the Wind Tunnels, cutting the Easy time to 0:55 and the Nightmare to 0:56. Sick and sick.

Jozsef Szalontai also took up the challenge, and with a project-inspired route change stomped all over his Nightmare Run of the Wizard's Manse taking three fat seconds off and getting 0:33. Sicker. This would be the demo of almost any update, but probably not this one, because...

No stranger to sickness is Thomas Stubgaard. Around the time of his now-famous 55 second Nightmare 100% of Shub-Niggurath's Pit, a question many people asked was if the Easy 100% could be done in one less revolution of that incomprehensible teleport thing. Thomas always claimed that it was impossible, right up until when he proved he was a lying scumbag and sent in 0:35. Demos don't get sicker than this.

Sneaking in between the sick SP action and the gruesome coops is Connor Fitzgerald effortlessly ogre grenade jumping his way around sm94_zwiffle faster than anyone else, getting 0:08 on Nightmare and 0:09 on slow-ogre-Easy.

Then we come (as it were) to the Udders. Hailing from some obscure and irrelevant part of Sweden, this troup of Quake speedrunnners hasn't been that active of late, but the Andersson not-brothers roped in Daniel Hansson to prove that they haven't lost all their skills.

They started with a3, with Jonny and DanielA giving Pif et Luc's two player runs a royal spanking. The Easy 0:20 is 11 seconds faster, and the Nightmare 0:19 no less than 18 seconds of improvement. Then DanielH arrived and played his part in a tablefilling 3 player Easy 100% that took just 1:36 from start to finish.

Now thoroughly warmed up, they took on some ID levels:

• the Installation 3-Player Nightmare 100% in 0:48 beating Basil de Vries, Paul Davies and Michael Hudson by 6 seconds.
• the Ogre Citadel 3-Player Easy 100% in 0:35 beating Carl Tholin, Jonny Andersson and Fredrik Eckers by 1 second.
• Termination Central 3-Player Nightmare 100% in 0:45 beating Nolan Pflug, Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner by 5 seconds.
• Ziggurat Vertigo 2-Player Nightmare 100% (Hansson had run away again) in 0:55 beating Luc de Mestre and Pif de Mestre by 1 second.

In other, older, news, Thomas Stubgaard, Thomas Bergendorff and Mathias Thore have finally released a three player run through the Runner's Delight episode they did while they were camping in Stubby's kitchen. The host says "it owns qd100qlite2 by miles and the included picture will get girls wet panties" but we can take no responsibility for the accuracy or otherwise of this remark.

All demos download for this small update is available from HERE.

Just 6 demos are in the 'in' tray right now, but I felt that I should step in and present them to you, because we have a couple of wacko ones. All of them are on some version of the classic ID deathmatch map The Abandoned Base.

Being a fairly new map, dm3rmx is still getting lots of attention. The last update mentioned that Jaakko Alakopsa managed a 1:20 for the Nightmare Run, but...

• He didn't stop there, sending in this 1:13 which somehow didn't quite get mentioned,
• And this 1:09 which was submitted slightly too late.

However, Connor Fitzgerald tried his hand at the map recently, and turned out this rather nice 0:49 on the Easy skill, fully 15 seconds faster than Jaakko. That's a trick (and time) I didn't see coming. Any demo which involves the player whittling himself down to 1 health is good in my eyes.

The more astute of you will have noticed that nobody has tried to returned this level to its 'Abandoned' status by annihilating all of its inhabitants. Look no further than this 3:51 from Alexander Osipov. Actually... look slightly further to this 3:48. Both demos are on Easy.

Connor also took a look at the slightly older remake of dm3, dm3sp. A few rocket jumps later, 0:23 plonks on our doorstep; 3 seconds faster than Dane Planchetta's previous Easy Run from a couple of years back. This one's pretty slick.

Er, yeah, that's it.

All demos download for this update is available from HERE.

Being the slack, lazy muh-fuh that I am, I haven't done an update for months. Now that I am doing one, it's going to be brief and unsatisfying. To be honest, very similar to having sex with me.

We've had a fair bit of classy action on the new dm3rmx.

• The Easy Run started its life with Michael Hudson swanning around like a big swanny swan and exiting in the not too shabby time of 1:29.
• But that was quickly shat on by this 1:11 from Paul Davies.
• Jaakko Alakopsa thought it was time to get in on the act and blasted home a 1:09...
• ... which he improved with an impressive 1:04. Under a minute is definitely there for the taking, I think. Just a bit of tidying up needed. *JUST*
• The Nightmare Run skipped the "Davies" step and went straight from Michael Hudson in 1:45...
• ...to Jaakko Alakopsa in 1:20.

The recent contest map end_pre needed some holes filling.

• Racing into our inbox came the Easy 100% in 0:16 by Jonathan Lenhardt, equalling Connor's Nightmare 100%
• But soon after, along came Mathias Thore with an awesome 0:15 beating Jonathan (and the contest winning NH) by 1 second.
• Dmitry Dementjev was the first of the bunny-bastards to fill the Nightmare Run gap with a 0:09, equalling Mandel's Easy Run time. Tom Nguyen was close behind him, but close, as the saying goes, only counts with grenades.

All these demos display a certain amount of excellence, but my favourite demo in this weeks bag o'love is the eyesock Nightmare 100% in 1:14 by Thomas Bergendorff, beating Amrik Kochhar by 3 seconds. There's just an intensity to a Bergie 100% that makes me shiver, even if (like here) he gaily misses a few shots.

Manslay showed some fine precision bunny skills with two near identical ne_dust2 Runs. He optimised (or should that be HOPtimised?) in 0:07 on both Easy (beating Tom Nguyen by 5 seconds) Nightmare (beating Jaakko Alakopsa by 11 seconds).

And that's Morfy spent.

If you weren't in a hole for the past week or so, you'd have noticed a little contest we ran, involving an awesome prize. Well, the results are now in! Go have a look at the Shub's Old Pit. Heartfelt congratulations to Flávio Quadros for a solid, high quality showing. Enjoy your Quad.

A demos update will happen... soon...

EDIT: The map end_pre has now been added to the archives, so get working on the other categories.

Thomas Stubgaard improved his Nightmare 100% of Shub-Niggurath's Pit to 1:16. It's alright.

Then he improved it to 0:55, same as the Easy 100%, which is FUCKING INCREDIBLE. Go watch. Now. Doesn't matter if you're at work, this one is worth getting fired for.

Get your fantabulous demos here.

You may not yet have entirely forgotten that there was a small speedcon-like event at the flat of a certain axe-swinging Dane a couple of weeks ago. Then Morfans promised to do an update, then nothing happened and now here I am.

As you would expect, the malodorous but talented combination of Thomas Stubgaard, Mathais Thore and (later) Thomas Bergendorff produced some fine, fine coops on fine, fine maps (and elin, for some reason).

Let's start, as the host and his first guest did, at the beginning: with the Slipgate Complex. They scrambled through the 2-Player Nightmare Run in 0:23, one second faster than Sergi Cami and Jordi Ros and meaning the demo is now faster than the single-player time again.

Next up the Grisly Grotto got 100% of a two player beating, the Easy 100% falling in 0:42, beating Carl Tholin and Jonny Andersson by two seconds, then they beat their old internet record by six seconds to get a fine lag-free 1:41 for the Nightmare 100%.

Then a pair of easy runs: the Dismal Oubliette 1:13 and the Wind Tunnels in 0:31.

After this quick tour of the categories, they tried something really silly: the 2 player Easy Run of The Netherworld. After a good deal of swearing, mostly at e3m2 and e3m4, they got away with a 2:27, two seconds faster than Robert and Rickard.

Relaxing back into the easier-for-coop 100% categories, they whacked out a 0:45 for the the Wizard's Manse 2-Player Easy 100% (one second faster than Daniel Andersson and Carl) and 1:46 for the exceptionally random Hell's Atrium 2-Player Nightmare 100%, 11 seconds faster than the Brothers Stubgaard.

Next in the list we find a boatload of 2 players demos in Shub-Niggurath's Pit:

• Easy Run in 0:14 beating Robert and Rickard by 1 second.
• Nightmare Run in 0:14 beating R&R by 1 second.
• Easy 100% in 0:51 beating Thomas and Martin by 1 second.
• Nightmare 100% in 1:32 beating themselves by 2 seconds.

Then Thomas Bergendorff showed up, but failed to drag the younglings away from end.bsp, in fact he was forced to record the 3 player easy run in 0:13 (new to the tables) and 100% in 0:50 (beating a very very bad demo from Thomas, Mathias and me by one second).

Finally, they escaped onto the three holes in the three player Easy 100% department: Ziggurat Vertigo in 0:29, The Pain Maze in 0:59 and the Nameless City in 1:27. All very nice demos, with e4m6 featuring something like the sixth underwater thunderbolt discharge of the update...

If you were going to stray from the ID maps at such an event as this, you'd think you'd head for a high quality map like hdn. And this lot of runners set course for exactly that map, but mysteriously first recorded two six second runs on the old contest map elin in easy and nightmare. Then they made it to hdn and recorded the Easy 100% in a fine 1:13 lots and lots faster than Jaakko, Lag.Com and me.

Now I've run out of demos to report, which is lucky because I've completely run out of the ability to typ

NEW CONTEST! The last one was an embarrassingly long time ago, but you know what 'soon' means here at SDA. Shub's Old Pit awaits you! EDIT: Seems we somehow forgot to mention the fact that there's a prize to win this time!! Spirit of quaddicted.com fame has graciously donated THIS for the winner! If that's not enough to tickle your fancy, then we don't know what is.

There's also a few demos to deal with, and here they are.

First of all, lfdm4 got a little spanking from Jonathan Lenhardt. He's taken one second off his own Nightmare 100% to record this slick 0:16. Recommended viewing.

The next demo improves one from way back in 1999 from David Eva. As Flávio Quadros correctly remarks, poor old David no longer possesses any records. A single second has been chipped off the mexx5 Nightmare Run, 1:21 now sitting comfortably.

Last for this mini-update, a long demo on the new but relatively untouched sewage. However, the runner in this case is one Daniel Wegert. Never heard of him? Neither have we! Welcome to the community, sielwolf. It's always great to see new faces, and not a bad first record either; he slogged through the difficult Nightmare 100% in 7:24, 35 seconds faster than Jaakko.

Why are you still reading? Get running end_pre!

Get your all demos download here.

Now you might think that the reason that this update is more than two weeks after the last is that we are terribly, terribly lazy. Not so! We received no demos at all until yesterday, when we received 28. You guys have no imagination.

Arriving an impressive -332 o'clock yesterday were Jaakko Alakopsa and David Spickerman's Manual 100% coops on lfdm4full, recording an Easy 0:21 and Nightmarish 0:31. Although these demos beat NahkahiiR's SP times quite handily, they looked less impressive when Jonathan Lenhardt suddenly learnt to aim and sent in impressive single player Easy 0:23 and Nightmare 0:32 demos.

Far from being discouraged, NahkahiiR and LLCoolDave goaded Lag.Com into a pair of 100% coops, getting 0:28 in the man's skill on cult and 0:38 in the little girl's skill on mbb7.

There was also a flurry of activity on Ankh's beautiful map, hdn. Jaakko was finally tricked into improving the Nightmare 100%, first to 6:02 and then to 5:21 but it was all for naught when Thomas Bergendorff rode into town on top of his sleek 4:05. Jaakko consoled himself by making a 3 player Easy 100% in 1:49 with the help of Paul Davies and Michael Hudson. the|navigator also improved his Nightmare Run by 1 second to get 0:20. Can anyone do the ER route?

Jaakko and his trusty steed then braved the wastes of Finland, beating off brigands, bandits and other ne'erdowells to reach the land of herb known only as "sidd's house". There he and the eponymous Aleksander Osipov recorded a small pile of demos:

• disgrace Easy Run in 0:31 beating Dan J and Asmodeus by 3 seconds.
• disgrace Easy 100% in 0:35 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 6 seconds.
• empire Easy 100% in 1:27 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 22 seconds.
• empire Nightmare 100% in 2:02 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 31 seconds.
• obiwan3 Easy 100% in 1:09 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 2 seconds.
• obiwan3 Nightmare 100% in 1:47 tablefiller (SP time 3:24).
• tohnsay Nightmare 100% in 1:58 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 28 seconds.
• tohnsay Easy 100% in 1:46 beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 16 seconds.
• ware Nightmare 100% in 0:30 tablefiller (SP time 0:49).
• ware Easy 100% in 0:27 tablefiller (SP time 0:40).

Now, the correct reaction to playing empire is generally held to be to hold you hands over your eyes and cowering under your desk whimpering "my eyes! my eyes! what an ugly map!". Proving yet again that he's the exception to the norm, NahkahiiR (who else) ran the Nightmare 100% in 3:27, 16 seconds faster than Morfans. He also recaptured the dam100 from the same old farmer with a 6 second beating yielding a nice round 2:00.

Considerably prettier than empire is sm100_pulsar. Jaakko and Dave took the Easy 100% tour in 0:33, matching the old three player record. Then when I was warming up for writing this update, Jaakko joined me in a spot of table filling; the sewage 2-Player Easy 100% was the target and a lag-tastic 3:15 was the result.

Getting back to ugly, I beat Pif's Nightmare 100% of killemal by 2 seconds to get 0:20 (well, somebody had to) and then the even uglier Jonathan Lenhardt beat me by 1 second and got 0:19.

Finally, we have a demo "for the tables and for the project", the project in question being the recently announced Delightful Run. Mathias Thore beat Jozsef's Easy Run on rd1m2b by one second to record 0:20. Can anyone keep up with the token Swede?

Now, there is a rumour that Mandel, Lodis and Stubgaard all met up in Copenhagen recently for a "mini-speedcon". Now, there aren't any demos from them in this update -- why could this be? Could it be that Morfans promised their demos the "special update" treatment, or did they spend the entire time trawling Copenhagen's gay bars? Only time will tell...